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For fossil hunters, it represents one of those breakthrough moments. A pterosaur has been found in China beautifully preserved with an egg. The egg indicates this ancient flying reptile was a female, and that realisation has allowed researchers to sex these creatures for the first time. Writing in Science magazine, the palaeontologists make some broad statements about differences in pterosaurs, including the observation that only males sported a head-crest. David Unwin, a palaeobiologist in the Department of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, was part of the research team. He told the BBC the discovery was astonishing: "If somebody...

> The pterosaur's wingspan and size have spawned comparisons to dragons. But recently some scientists wondered whether the creature was too big to fly. A pair of papers recently asserted that the biggest pterosaurs may have been too heavy to get off the ground. That seemed implausible to Habib. After all, the biggest birds often have the longest flight range. And Quetzalcoatlus, with its 35-foot wingspan, certainly fits the bill for gigantic. So Habib teamed up with Mark Witton, a British paleontologist, to plug in factors like wingspan, weight and aerodynamics into a computer model. The results, which they presented...

A well-preserved pterosaur with soft tissues reveals this flying reptile had hair, claws and wings that were unlike anything seen on today's living animals, suggests a new paper. Analysis of the remains, which date to around 140 to 130 million years ago, indicate pterosaurs were warm-blooded insect eaters that may have lived in trees and possessed sophisticated flying skills. "Pterosaurs are unique in their bone construction and our study also shows that some of the soft tissues of these creatures differ from anything known today," says study author Dr Alexander Kellner.

British and Moroccan scientists said Tuesday they had found the remains of two new species of extinct animals in the Saharan desert, describing the find as one of the most important of the past 50 years. The team of paleontologists said they had unearthed a new species of pterosaur, a flying reptile from the Mesozoic era, and a new type of sauropod, a giant four-legged herbivore from the Jurassic period.

DISCOVERING a rare, 100 million-year-old fossil is amazing enough. But not as surprising as the way Queensland Museum palaeontologist Alex Cook found it. Keen for a break after more than three hours of driving, Dr Cook thought he would stretch his legs at the northwest Queensland town of Hughenden - and literally stumbled over the fossil. "I found it literally on the side of the road. It's serendipity, a happy accident," Dr Cook said today. It is the third jaw fragment of a pterosaur - a winged, fish-eating reptile that lived in the time of the dinosaurs - found in...

Intermittent expeditions on Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, from 1994 through 2004, resulted in the compilation of eyewitness testimonies that substantiated a hypothesis that pterosaurs may not be extinct. Long Beach, Calif. (PRWEB) July 20, 2006 -- The conflict between evolution and creation took a new form with an investigation of reports of a pterosaur-like creature in Papua New Guinea. According to standard models of science, all pterosaurs became extinct by about 65-million years ago, but traditional interpretations of the Bible suggest that they lived in human times. According to Jonathan Whitcomb, a forensic videographer who interviewed native islanders in...

Abstract Because evolutionists cannot show how pterosaurs might have evolved from bats or birds, they must fall back on "convergent evolution" that says similar structures developed more than once, in pterosaurs and in the birds, which are only distantly related. The pterosaur ("teer-o-sore") was a remarkable flying reptile of the pre-Flood, and possibly post-Flood world. They must have been an incredible sight in their day. Pterosaurs came in a wide variety. The largest had a wingspan of 40 ft (12m) Quetzalcoatlus named after a winged serpent god. How did pterosaurs acquire flight? Secular scientists are not sure. The fourth digit...

Dinosaur Breath The largest flying creature alive today is the Andean condor Vultur gryphus. At maximum size it weighs about 22 pounds and has a wingspread of about 10 feet. But 65 million years ago in the late cretaceous period, the last age of dinosaurs, there was another larger flying animal, the giant pterosaur Quetzalcotalus. It had a wingspread of over 40 feet, the size of a small airplane. Other pterosaurs were also quite large. The pteranodons of the late jurassic period, the classic flying dinosaurs of magazine illustrations, had a maximum wingspan of about 33 feet. This presents a...